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Sunday, June 4, 2017

The Early Release of Violent Prisoners: A National Disgrace

In 2007, after being convicted of assault with intent to do great bodily harm, an Isabella County judge in central Michigan sentenced Erie Lee Ramsey to five to fifteen years behind bars. The 25-year-old felon from Mount Pleasant, a town 120 miles northwest of Detroit, had previous felony convictions for destruction of police property, resisting arrest, and assault with a dangerous weapon. Ramsey had proven himself to be a violent, lawless person unfit for life outside of prison.

In the summer of 2012, a Michigan parole board set this violent man free after he had served his minimum sentence of five years. During his relatively short prison stretch, Ramsey had been cited for inmate misconduct six times. Putting this prisoner back into society turned out to be a stupid, disastrous decision by so-called experts in the corrections field.

At nine-thirty on the night of January 16, 2013, Eric Ramsey drove his pickup onto the campus of Central Michigan University. He arrived on campus with the intent of abducting, raping, and murdering the first vulnerable woman who crossed his path. Outside the Student Activity Center, Ramsey approached a senior from Grand Rapids as she walked toward her car. He stuck a BB handgun into the victim's face, opened the door to her 2003 Ford Escape, and ordered her into the vehicle. Ramsey climbed in behind the wheel, and drove the abductee to his house in Mount Pleasant where he bound her with tape and raped her.

Later that night, Ramsey forced the terrified college student back into her car. He also placed two cans of gasoline in the vehicle, and drove north out of Mount Pleasant. When they reached nearby Lincoln Township, Ramsey informed his victim that he was going to kill her. (I presume he intended to use the gasoline to torch the Ford Escape with her in it.) Moments after Ramsey announced his plan to murder his captive, she opened her back passenger seat door and rolled out of the moving vehicle.

The young woman, not seriously injured from her vehicular escape, jumped to her feet and ran to the closest house where she pounded on the door and screamed for help. A 14-year-old boy, at home with his 11-year-old sister and a younger brother who was two, let the frantic woman into their dwelling. As the victim used the teenager's cellphone to call 911, he armed himself with a hunting knife.

Eric Ramsey climbed out of the Ford Escape, grabbed the two cans of gasoline, and walked up to the house occupied by the victim and the boy who had taken her in. Using the gasoline as an accelerant, Ramsey set fire to the place, climbed back into the victim's car, and drove off. Shortly after Ramsey torched the house, the occupants' parent arrive home, and using an extinguisher, doused the small blaze.

Just after midnight, a Michigan State Police officer spotted Ramsey and the Ford Escape in Gaylord, an Otsego County town north of Mount Pleasant. Ramsey intentionally drove his victim's car into the state patrol vehicle, veered off onto a field, jumped out of the damaged vehicle, and ran. In Gaylord, Ramsey stole a Ford F-350 sanitation truck, rammed another state police car, and continued north into Crawford County. Near the town of Fredric about 70 miles north of Mount Pleasant, Ramsey plowed the city garbage truck into a police car driven by a Crawford County sheriff's deputy. Just before climbing out of the sanitation vehicle, Ramsey posted the following message on his Facebook page: "Well folks, I'm about to be shot." (In the era of social media, even fleeing felons find time to post real-time messages. It's a strange world.)

Ramsey had correctly predicted his fate. The Crawford County Deputy whose car Ramsey had disabled, shot him dead.

Eric Lee Ramsey was not some drug-addled mental case who flipped-out and embarked on a criminal rampage. He had carried out a planned kidnapping and rape of a total stranger. Had this young woman not escaped, he would have murdered her and set her body on fire. If this wasn't bad enough, the 30-year-old felon had set fire to a house occupied by four people, and tried to kill three police officers.

Members of the parole board who let this dangerous man out of prison ten years early are responsible for the college student's abduction and rape. It's a miracle she wasn't killed, and that held true for the three police officers Ramsey crashed into. Under the circumstances, it's not a bad thing that Ramsey is dead. That's what he wanted, that's what he deserved, and that's what he got.

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LITERARY QUOTATIONS: GENRE

LITERARY QUOTATIONS: GENRE is a compilation of informative and entertaining quotes by writers, editors, critics, journalists, and literary agents on the subject of literary genre. The quotes also touch on the subjects of craft, creativity, publishing, and the writing life.

Contributors

A graduate of Westminster College (Pennsylvania) and Vanderbilt University Law School, I am the author of twelve non-fiction books on crime, criminal investigation, forensic science, policing, and writing. I have been nominated twice for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allen Poe Award in the Best Fact Crime Category. As a former FBI agent, criminal investigator, author, and professor of criminal justice at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, I have been interviewed numerous times on television and radio and for the print media.
For more information about me, please visit my web site at http://jimfisher.edinboro.edu.